With the release of their sophomore LP Omega La La earlier this year, Rubblebucket stepped forward with a new sound that saw the band largely depart from the Afrobeat influences from which they first emerged. On the new album, the Brooklyn-based group discovers their sound while keeping intact the infectious grooves, complex arrangements and high energy delivery that first propelled them onto the scene. Just before kicking off their Fall tour, Rubblebucket lead vocalist and sax player Kalmia Traver took the time to chat with Jambands.com about the band, the new direction and the ongoing question surrounding the hippie/hipster divide.
How did you guys first come together as a band? What was the scene like in Vermont in those days?
Alex and I had already moved out of Vermont when the band started. But we would go back there all the time and we used to always go to jazz fest every year. That was our tradition…I don’t know if you’ve ever been but it’s a really fun week to be in Burlington. It’s a sort of mini-Vermont version of South by South West—there’s music everywhere at all times.
During the Burlington Jazz Fest in ’07 a friend of Alex’s—drummer Jeremy Frederick of the ‘slow-core’ indie-rock group Swale—asked him to bring a bassist, guitarist and some horns to this art party at The Hood Plant in Burlington, VT. There we joined up with Jeremy and four percussionists and we improvised lots of music with solid form—pretty fiery bag! Craig Myers was one of the percussionists and he stood out because he also played this instrument we’d never seen, N’Goni. That was our first time meeting him.
So that was the seed, but after that we got a lot more serious about it and we wrote out charts for all the songs and had massive rehearsals in Burlington. It was really a series of phone calls getting the band together and then that fall we took it a step further and went to Boston where we had more, massive rehearsals. During the few years after that, we really refined the personnel to what it is now just through connections and the community.
How did you guys decide on the band name?
I think we’re still always second-guessing it, because it’s so silly. But no one’s thought of anything better. It’s the tool used in stone masonry. Craig is a stone mason and a “rubble bucket” is what Vermont stone masons call it. On a larger scale, actual industrial grade rubble buckets are used in construction and earthquake cleanup. It has a cool symbolic meaning for me—the rubble and the earth and just being close to the earth…that’s a cool image to me.
So how did the move from Vermont to Boston and then to Brooklyn affect the band and the direction it took?
We’ve been in Brooklyn for about a year and half now. Burlington was so amazing and such a dense and really integrated community of artists and musicians—you’re always collaborating with everyone else. Boston is a step away from that because there’s so many music schools and there’s so many kids with guitars on their backs just trying to make it work. There’s way less gigs to be had, so it’s way more competitive. Brooklyn is totally a different planet. Sometimes when I go back and forth between Brooklyn and Vermont I literally feel like I’m going between two different planets—just the vibe of the people is just incredibly…Vermont is just so much slower and, in a way, more genuine…people just look you in the eye more. Then you get to Brooklyn and I can barely keep up. I think there’s a real association with Brooklyn that people have, but it’s not necessarily negative. It’s so known for its experimental music and just being a hotbed for music and art. It’s fun because we have to live up to that and we get to be brushing shoulders with a plethora of amazing artists and musicians that facilitate great art making and video making and costume making. It’s just all here.
Who were some of your biggest influences when the band was first getting started?
Back in the beginning we were totally checking out Fela Kuti. A lot of the Afrobeat and also just afro pop and traditional West African music was just bumping in our speakers a lot during that time. Pretty much all of us were jazz heads to start out with, especially Alex and I and Adam…so we had this really good foundation for challenging music and from there it’s just been a steady progression towards pop. And that is so good for me, personally. There were some pretty important rock bands that I had never even listened to, like Led Zeppelin or The White Stripes. I’ll be like, “yeah, I know that band but I’ve never sat and listened to an album before.” That’s been really fun, to realize we are a rock band and we can totally have fun in the rock medium.
Also, what we’re working on is songwriting and building structures that are agreeable to lots of people and not just indulging ourselves all the time. I think also when Ian [guitar] and Dave [drums] joined the band, they kind of brought in more of an appreciation for 80s pop that hadn’t really been alive quite yet. We just really started listening to that together—like Mariah Carey and Prince and Michael Jackson and Michael McDonald…so lots of really amazing 80s beats that started to get ingrained two years ago or so.
The new album Omega La La seems to have pushed aside the Afrobeat influence, in a sense, and in its place is a sound that is more distinctively Rubblebucket. Was that a conscious decision or did it come about more organically?
I think a little bit of both. With Alex, who’s the band leader and, I would say, the musical vision provider in general…we’ve been talking about it a lot for the past few years, just wanting to be more in the pop realm. Not necessarily being played on FM radio, but just have that sort of appreciation more than we did before. That doesn’t mean you can’t have afro-folk rhythms—not that that’s our native language anyway—but yeah, we knew after the first album that that wasn’t our sound and we knew that we wanted to keep finding it even if we had to sacrifice a few fans along the way. We just wanted to be doing what our hearts told us…and our ears. You may have noticed that there’s never been much care about fitting into a particular genre.
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